Many presentation applications allow the development of presentations comprising a number of “slides” containing text, drawing objects, images, videos, animations, and other content. The slides of a presentation usually all share consistent dimensions. While the dimensions of slides may vary, traditionally the dimensions of slides in a presentation have been set to create a rectangular slide that translates to an aspect ratio (width:height) of 4:3. This is a standard ratio utilized for years in television, cinematography, photography (e.g. 35 mm slides), and the like. However, many modern computer monitors, televisions, projectors, tablet computers, mobile phones, and the like employ a “widescreen” format with varied aspect ratios from 2.39:1 to 16:10. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (“SMPTE”) adopted a 16:9 aspect ratio format in the 1980s for High Definition Television (“HDTV”), and this standard 16:9 aspect ratio is widely accepted as a standard for television screens, projectors, monitors, and other display devices.
Because of the persistence of the 4:3 aspect ratio in presentation applications for many years, many presentations, templates, sample presentations, and the like have slides with dimensions that correspond to this ratio, such as 10″ wide by 7½″ high. When these slides are converted to widescreen format for display on a monitor, television, projector, or other device, various known methods may be utilized to scale the slides to fit the screen. For example, each slide may be stretched to fill the display area, causing drawing objects, images, videos, and other graphical content to appear distorted. Letterboxing may also be utilized, where the slides are scaled down evenly to fit in both dimensions, and black bars (or some other graphical elements) are placed around the edges where content does not appear due to the disparity in aspect ratios between the slides and the display device. Similarly, cropping may be utilized to cut out portions of the original slides from the display so that the remaining content fills the entire screen.
It will be appreciated that these methods may not result in an acceptable display of the slides in the presentation. Instead, the presentation designer may wish to convert the slides of the presentation to have dimensions that conform to the new target aspect ratio. This may be done manually by the presentation designer by reformatting and repositioning the text, drawing objects, images, videos, animations, and other content objects on every slide for an acceptable display. However, manual conversion of the slides may be tedious and time consuming. Alternatively, the slides of the presentation may be converted to the new dimensions automatically by the presentation application. Generally, however, the automatic conversion by the presentation application simply results in each content object on the slides being stretched to conform to the new aspect ratio, which may result in unwanted distortion of the content.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.